UCSF Ranked Among Worst Animal Testing Offenders

PETA’s Interactive ‘Failed Tests’ Resource Calls Out School for Using Tens of Thousands of Animals in Cruel Experiments

For Immediate Release:
September 16, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

As the school year begins at the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF), PETA is alerting students to its new feature, “Failed Tests,” which ranks colleges as “bad,” “worse,” or “worst” for animals—and UCSF, which used more than 1,100 rabbits, nearly 7,000 voles, and dozens of monkeys, sheep, and pigs in experiments last year, is among the “worst.”

UCSF received $459 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2018. According to a federal report, the university subjected 878 rabbits to experiments in which they experienced unrelieved pain and distress. Federal documents further reveal that UCSF experimenters failed to give sufficient analgesics to animals who were used in invasive surgeries. Mice died from dehydration after no one noticed that the water lines to their  cages were clogged. Experimenters also routinely deviated from approved protocols. For example, in one 2017 study, experimenters subjected a pig to 50 times more puffs of steam to his gallbladder than had been permitted. He stopped eating and was euthanized, and a necropsy indicated that his stomach had been perforated.

“Students live and work on university campuses for years without knowing that animals are being burned, poisoned, crippled, blinded, and tormented in a host of other ways right under their noses,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “As the school year begins, PETA is asking caring UCSF students to speak out against the abuse of sensitive, sentient beings in their midst.”

PETA points out that a 2018 Pew Research poll found that the majority of Americans oppose animal experimentation, with even greater opposition among younger demographics such as college students. No animal test is prohibited by law, no matter how painful or irrelevant, and mice, rats, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are excluded from protection under federal law.

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic science research—much of it involving animal experiment—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please click here.